Trump’s Entire Nativist Agenda Is Based on a Lie

“They’re taking our jobs . . . They’re taking our money. They’re killing us,” is how then-candidate Donald Trumpcharacterized immigrants in July 2015. For nearly two and a half years, the man who practically founded his campaign on anti-immigrant sentiment—“when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” was his first attempt at a presidential address—has warned his fellow Americans that immigrants and refugees, regardless of their status, are undermining the economy, driving down wages, and mooching off government benefits at every level. Based on this argument, a man who’s sourced two-thirds of his spouses from Eastern Europe has vowed to increase border control to unprecedented levels; repeatedly demanded a multi-billion-dollar wall that even his chief of staff has called “uninformed”; proffered legislation that would slash legal immigration by 50 percent over the next decade; and made the case that the U.S. should reduce the number of refugees that will be allowed into the country to the lowest level since the Refugee Act of 1980 was created. But one needn’t look further than Trump’s own family business to see that the president’s logic is completely bunk.

Amidst the slew of anti-immigrant rhetoric that spews from the White House on a daily basis, BuzzFeed News reports Trump Winery—an establishment that trades in “Welch’s grape jelly with alcohol” and is owned by Eric Trump—has sought permission to hire 23 more foreign guest workers, according to a Department of Labor petition. The workers were requested under the H-2 visa program, which allows U.S. companies to employ foreign workers on temporary work visas, as long as no qualified U.S. workers want the jobs they’ll be hired to fill. BuzzFeed also reports that companies bearing the Trump name are perennial users of the program, having requested more than 400 H-2 visas since the ex-real-estate developer announced his candidacy. (Neither the White House nor the winery responded to BuzzFeed’s request for comment.)

All of which, ironically, highlights the critical role immigrant labor plays in the U.S. economy—in fact, there is a large amount of evidence that a number of industries (and Mar-a-Lago) wouldn’t survive without it. In April, more than a thousand economists wrote an open letter to the president to give him a refresher on the importance of immigration to the U.S. economy. Separately, experts have estimated that given that as much as 70 percent of the U.S. agricultural workforce doesn’t have valid immigration papers, a wide-scale crackdown could essentially demolish the farming industry. (As Bank of America’s Ethan Harris noted in February, “There’s no way to get people out of the city and into the country to pick crops on short notice without a very dramatic increase in wages”; such an increase would represent a death blow to an industry where profits are already tanking, and which would struggle to afford the spike without passing on massive costs to consumers.) Oh, and remember Trump’s big infrastructure plan—coming any day now!—? Without immigrant labor, it’s basically dead on arrival.

Trump’s White House, of course, has done its best to bury these facts. Back in September, The New York Timesrevealed that after the Department of Health and Human Services found that refugees generated $63 billion more in government revenues than they cost over the past decade, Trump officials, lead by Lady Liberty nemesisStephen Miller, simply rejected the draft. Instead, the three-page report that was ultimately submitted “[used] government data to compare the costs of refugees to Americans and [made] no mention of revenues contributed by refugees.” Presumably, Team Trump will rely on that “data” when it sets the number of refugees the U.S. will take in for the fiscal year, the deadline for which is October 1.

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The big five Wall Street banks—JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, Bank of America Corp, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, and Morgan Stanley—reported an average revenue decline of 32 percent for the fourth quarter, and 12 percent for the full year. Even though stock markets hit new highs and bond markets moved little, executives said it was hard to generate income from inactive customers. As a result, bonuses could be 10 percent to 20 percent lower than the prior year, and traders who sit on desks that posted losses could get nothing at all, consultants and recruiters said in interviews.

According to Reuters, staff in Goldman Sachs’s commodities trading unit have been told to expect “little to no bonus for 2017 performance,” which has likely led to more than a few existential crises.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced Friday it charged Patrick K. McDonnell and his company CabbageTech with “fraud and misappropriation in connection with purchases and trading of Bitcoin and Litecoin.” Based just outside Manhattan, in Staten Island, New York, CabbageTech operated under the name “Coin Drop Markets.” Since around January 2017, the company promised customers real-time trading advice but never provided it and essentially disappeared after receiving payment, the complaint said.

“Defendants also solicited ‘lifetime’ memberships in a more exclusive trading sector that would provide greater opportunities to profit from virtual currency trading,” the complaint said. ”For example, one such opportunity purported to offer profits as much as 300% return on an investment in less than a week.”

CabbageTech’s lawyers did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

In other bitcoin news, Bloomberg reports that party-goers on the “second annual Blockchain Cruise,” which featured talks by crypto-believers and “Bitcoin-themed rap,” were unfazed by the fact that the price of bitcoin had sunk to $10,000 by the time the ship pulled into Thailand on Wednesday. “Nothing goes up in a straight line,” said Ronnie Moas, founder of Miami Beach-based Standpoint Research, and one of the event’s speakers. He said he could see the currency hitting $300,000 within the next seven years.

Elsewhere!

Trump’s Lawyer Created an Entire Shell Company to Pay Off a Porn Star (The Hive)